Loggers To Cut Beetle-Infested Trees Due To Fire Hazard, Timber Near Hayden Lake, Coeur D’Alene To Be Sold Within 30 Days

Loggers will be able to go after infested Douglas fir trees on Forest Service land in North Idaho and Eastern Washington within weeks.

The U.S. Forest Service will start selling beetle-infested trees by the end of July, the agency said Monday. Between 130 million and 170 million board feet of timber - enough to build 13,000 to 17,000 homes - ultimately will be taken from the Colville and Idaho Panhandle national forests.

It’s a good start, but the Forest Service barely is addressing the problem, says the timber industry.

The environmental community, however, is promising a legal challenge.

Waving a gallon of dead beetles for emphasis, Panhandle Forests supervisor Dave Wright and Colville supervisor Robert Vaught called logging 24,300 infested acres the best thing for the forests.

“We’re not in a natural condition - we’re in an epidemic condition,” Wright said.

“This isn’t a timber sale - this is an ecosystem enhancement project,” Vaught added.

The most immediate logging is supposed to take place in the Hayden Lake and Coeur d’Alene area - the so-called urban-wild land interface - where, foresters say, the fire risk from the dying Douglas fir is the highest.

Forest Service brass have given the two national forests an emergency exemption to start selling trees on 4,000 acres in that area within 30 days instead of waiting until they receive all public comments on the plan.

The forests also have permission to exceed the 40-acre maximum size for clearcuts on the 5,000 total acres of clearcuts in the project area. The single largest clearcut, in the Priest Lake area, will be 100 acres, the agency said.

But these are not the clearcuts of the old days in which every stick of timber was sawed down, the Forest Service said. Instead, about 20 percent of the trees will be left.

Some of the more controversial areas are being dropped from the Forest Service’s plans to deal with the beetle infestation. The beetle outbreak hasn’t hit the Bumble Bee and Steamboat areas on the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River hard enough to justify logging, Wright said.

Environmentalists have been critical of plans to do more logging there, considering the intensity of historic logging and road construction.

The Forest Service also has decided to make road removal and watershed rehabilitation a mandatory part of most of the timber sales instead of waiting to see if the sales earn enough money to pay for the work later. If the industry doesn’t agree to buy some timber with those conditions, the logging won’t take place, Wright said.

Overall, the timber industry is tentatively pleased.

“The Forest Service proposal is, let’s clean up the dead trees, capture their value and at the same time improve the watershed condition,” said Jim Riley of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association. “Anybody that looks at the forest needs to conclude action is needed - there’s just a sea of dead trees out there.”

The challenge is in the details. The timber has to be worth enough to cover the restoration work, Riley said. And the timing of that restoration - such as requiring it be done before the trees are cut, will make a difference in how eager industry is to take a particular sale.

To industry, however, the Forest Service is taking on 25,000 acres of the problem when it ought to be considering logging across 250,000 acres.

“While what they proposed here is exciting, I am worried about the 90 percent they haven’t even made a plan to deal with,” Riley said. “The beetle’s not waiting.”

Wright says the Forest Service initially looked at 250,000 acres of Douglas fir stands, but found scattered beetle outbreaks on about half of that. The worst is the 25,000 acres being dealt with.

“We are trying very hard not to over-react,” Wright said.

The environmental community is furious.

“We are skeptical about this process of taking a chain-saw in to fix what a chain-saw caused,” said Lew Persons, executive director of the Lands Council. “That would be a first.”

“We are disappointed by this process of using scare tactics - selling people on the danger of fire, selling them on the danger of bugs spreading to private land,” Persons said.

The Forest Service already has admitted it can’t stop fires through logging, Persons said. By logging, and leaving limbs and tops, the Forest Service will create more fire danger short-term.

Logging won’t change bug migration, Persons claimed.

And in the end, the courts probably will be the referee.

“We fully expect to challenge the entire sale,” Persons said.